Redrawing the Frontier

: A Cultural History of American and Franco-Belgian Western Comics

Abstract

This study provides a cultural history of the Western genre in the comics medium, from the late 1800s up until the 1970s. Historically, this chronology is not arbitrary, and represents the core years in which the Western genre was forged and prospered in a range of popular media. The genre maintained a powerful symbolic resonance in popular culture in these years precisely for its ability to concurrently look backward and forward: that is, the Western told of a frontier past rich in action and imperial adventure, but simultaneously formed a mythic expression of its contemporaneous publication context. The glut of scholarship into the Western tends to utilise a cultural studies approach to read the genre in these terms, tracing the revisions and renewals of the genre through a chronological history, illustrating the Western’s suppleness and sensitivity to shifts in national mood and historical change. However, the contention of Western scholarship (which is laden with studies of Western films, literature, painting, and so on) is that none have considered the mythic West in comics. Granted, the Western comics frontier is vast. Therefore, this dissertation’s cultural history of the Western genre in American and Franco-Belgian comics traditions should be read as a useful start point into this rich area of study.

For the United States portion of the thesis, the study will reflect upon a number of key historical timeframes, from Indian Wars reportage in nineteenth- century magazine cartoons; cowboy adventure comics and the Cold War; to the acerbic and brutal revisions of the genre in the wake of the Vietnam War; revealing how the ostensibly simplistic moral conflicts common in Western adventure comics concealed a highly politicised agenda, and argue that they could equally support and subvert the grand narratives from a given era. The complementing analysis of Franco- Belgian Western comics extends these findings: from examining the impact of U.S. Cold War geopolitics upon European-produced American Western comics; to exploring the response to Vietnam and the emergent counter-culture through revisionary Western comics that incorporated European influences like the visual and thematic language of the Italian Spaghetti Western. The use of comics as a primary source is intended to signal to new and alternate avenues for studying the Western genre, whilst bearing broader questions about the utility of comics as a cultural artefact and as a lens into an historical moment.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Dundee
Supervisor	Chris Murray (Supervisor) & Brian Hoyle (Supervisor)